What’s This All About?

What is The Unity Wars?

Well, it’s an upcoming series of science fiction adventures. The best description so far is, “The Clone Wars crossed with The Horus Heresy, with influence from the Lensman series, Hammer’s Slammers, and Farscape.”

Confused yet? Hopefully also curious and a little excited.

I fiddled around with writing science fiction for several years before I became an action-adventure writer. It was mostly Star Wars and Wing Commander flavored at the time. I’ve always enjoyed science fiction, specifically what can often be described as “space opera,” adventures in deep space and on distant worlds. And I’ve also always wanted to go back to it.

A few years ago (before Disney Star Wars, which we won’t go into), I got a wild hair and asked myself, “What if the Star Wars prequels were better-written? What if the Clone Wars were more like what was hinted at in the earlier Expanded Universe?” I started to scribble some notes, but it was ultimately doomed to go nowhere, since I have no desire to get sued into oblivion by Lucasfilm/Disney.

Then Galaxy’s Edge happened.

If you’re not familiar with Galaxy’s Edge, go take a look at www.galacticoutlaws.com. Nick Cole has described it as StarWarsNotStarWars. It uses many of the familiar tropes and technology of the Star Wars universe, but is still it’s own setting, its own story. It is also awesome. And so the gears started turning again, and I turned back to “Alt Clone Wars.”

I’ve always enjoyed Star Wars (though largely limited to the original trilogy, the X-Wing games, and a few of the novels, most notably Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy). But some things about it have always bugged me. Why are all the starships either airplanes in space or naval vessels in space? Sure, they look cool, but they don’t make much sense in space. And the less said about the military aspects, the better. (Clone troopers running at the enemy across open ground, firing from the hip…Bleh.)

Epic Science Fiction

So, I pulled out my old AltStarWars file and started tweaking it. The end result is the beginnings of what promises to be a sprawling, galaxy-spanning science fiction epic. There will be several intertwining arcs, aliens, vast fleets and armies, dark conspiracies, and all sorts of space opera goodness. It’s not Star Wars, or Galaxy’s Edge. It’s not Lensman. The Unity Wars is entirely its own story, in its own setting, and it will be going places that no one else has gone.